1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to Distributed Document Production (DDP), allowing print shops to transmit print job data to other print shops for off-site production, and in particular, to a technique for coordinating the processing of a print job by a plurality of print shops.
2. Description of the Related Art
Presently, the augmenting importance of electronic methods of submitting and managing print jobs, coupled with advances in reliable, high speed networks, increases the possibilities for more flexible management of production printing. In particular, such technology is enabling the development of distributed document production (DDP) solutions allowing print shops to transmit print job data to other print shops for off-site production. This is beneficial to the print shops in a number of ways, including:                a) Load balancing: Shops which would otherwise have to turn jobs away due to full capacity can now accept those jobs and have them produced elsewhere. Likewise, shops operating below capacity can solicit jobs from other print shops.        b) Print nearest customer: By having jobs produced nearer to the customer, shops can take advantage of low costs of distribution for the end product.        c) Access specialist services: Shops need not provide services, such as for example, advanced desktop publishing services, but can use other shops which do provide these services for all or part of the production of a job.        
Although current technologies facilitate the distribution of electronic job data, print shops must first solve the problem of identifying who to partner with for any particular job. The range of potential partners may be large or may be unknown. To realize the benefits of DDP, shops require a rapid and efficient method of identifying potential collaborators on a job-by-job basis. For example, in the case of sending a job elsewhere, shops need to know which other shops currently have the facilities and spare capacity to produce the job to the required quality and to the contracted deadline.
In order to support the identification of collaboration partners for the purposes of DDP, several techniques have been developed up to now for providing a computer-based automatic scheduling system, where a central scheduling department or centralized scheduling system centrally controls the schedules of multiple shops and allocates jobs to whichever shop it decides is best suited. Respective commercial products are the “Logic Management Systems” produced by Logic Associates and the “Printer's Management System” produced by Hagen Systems.
Distributed scheduling applications (in which multiple, separate scheduling applications message each other) also exist where control of the allocation of jobs is delegated to computer systems, which treat the issue as one of resource allocation between separate entities. Such systems compute the optimum or the satisfactory using highly formulaic reasoning involving, for example, resolving constraint satisfaction problems. An example for this category is the “Zippin” research system produced by Xerox.
Another approach is that taken by document bid/broker-based systems, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,826,244 and 6,078,906. Such systems typically make the virtue of anonymity by focusing primarily on request and bids rather than requester and bidders. In contrast a human manager of a print shop will make decisions on accepting or declining print jobs on the basis of a range of criteria which are likely to be exceptionally difficult to formalize.
All conventional computer-based automatic scheduling systems have the drawback that they do not support local decision-making and control over print queues, but require multiple shops to give up local control of their schedules to a central unit, and that they do not allow human decision-making to an adequate extent.